[wardoggie]

 moose_n_squirrel, on 07 June 2012 - 09:48 AM, said:

 wardoggie, on 07 June 2012 - 08:44 AM, said:

 JeffFields, on 07 June 2012 - 07:43 AM, said:

If you are rebooting a Mac often enough to even notice what reboot times are, you're doing it wrong. There is no reason to reboot a Mac more often than every few weeks or so.

Why is it wrong? I shut down my MBP when I leave in the morning and reboot when I get home at night. Doesn't bother me or the machine at all. My work iMac stays on all the time and usually the only time I reboot it is when a software update requires it.

The more seriously you use your Mac, the worse an idea it is to shutdown/restart.

So...not really wrong, you're just impatient?

The main reason I shut down my MBP is Yahoo IM and some other services I'm connected at home to will protest when I get to work and try to log on. Plus, I am mostly doing casual stuff at home. I have a little script that opens the stuff I use, logs me into services, etc. It even says "ready" when it's done loading everything. The process takes about three minutes, max.

Like I said in my original post, my work iMac at the office stays on all the time. For "security" purposes, I enable the sleep/screen saver lock.

[robertcoogan]

 odaiwait1m1, on 07 June 2012 - 08:04 AM, said:

 robertcoogan, on 07 June 2012 - 07:22 AM, said:

You should mention kernel_task, the bane of process hogs. You can't Force Quit it, ypu can't stop it at all, other than to restart, apparently. Is there a way around that problem?

Do I need to recalibrate my Sarcasm detector? This post reads like someone saying "I love my Mustang, but there's this weird noisy thing in the front part which is sucking down my gas for no reason."

Wow...you obviously have a short fuze. I was asking for help, not b****ing and moaning. Calm down, and take a breather.

And trolling...? Trolling is spending time on the Internet, looking for things to be outraged about. Which it seems you have found.

Hypocrite.

[robertcoogan]

It does slow things down a lot. I have noticed that it can hog up to 80% of processor usage. iTunes and Safari take the biggest hit, slowing to a crawl. So I restart, and move on. It doesn't crop up much (maybe twice a week).

[lightnquick]

 moose_n_squirrel, on 07 June 2012 - 09:48 AM, said:

 wardoggie, on 07 June 2012 - 08:44 AM, said:

 JeffFields, on 07 June 2012 - 07:43 AM, said:

If you are rebooting a Mac often enough to even notice what reboot times are, you're doing it wrong. There is no reason to reboot a Mac more often than every few weeks or so.

Why is it wrong? I shut down my MBP when I leave in the morning and reboot when I get home at night. Doesn't bother me or the machine at all. My work iMac stays on all the time and usually the only time I reboot it is when a software update requires it.

The more seriously you use your Mac, the worse an idea it is to shutdown/restart. I'm the type who is always in the middle of one or two big projects, with several apps open, and maybe a couple document open in each app. To shut down means to close down all apps and documents. To start up means wait for startup, wait until all apps are open again, wait until all documents are open again, wait until all documents are scrolled back to the pages and zoom levels they were on. But if you don't shut down, all you have to do is wake from sleep and all your work is exactly as you left it. In other words, if you don't shut down, what you have is an instant-on machine. Much more efficient.

Secondly, your apps will start up slower if you shut down. Try this sometime. Reboot and then launch an app you think is slow, and time it. Quit the app, and launch and time it again, and it should launch much faster. Why? Because its program data got cached. But the caches get dumped at shutdown. This means, every time you shut down your Mac, you guarantee the maximum launch time for all your apps next time you launch them.

This doesn't mean you have to change what you're doing. If you are a casual Mac user who uses maybe one app at a time, and doesn't notice app launch times, this doesn't apply to you and you can shut down all you want, and it won't be a problem.

That is why I, too, go weeks without restarting my MacBook Pro. I love opening my Mac and starting to work, while watching PC users wait 3 minutes for their machines to start and get set up because they don't trust their PCs to be stable enough to stay up for weeks.

One drawback, however, of this approach is that battery performance declines quicker in a device that is constantly plugged in. If battery life (and its life expectancy) is important to you, It is recommended to unplug a notebook frequently for several hours. The other (and very different) issue is the power draw of devices that are on standby - in a household this can amount to quite a bit. Maybe I'm idealistic here, but I think one should, on a personal level, try and save energy wherever possible. I'm powering down my whole work area - MacBook, monitors, printer, scanner overnight; the 30 seconds boot time in the morning are used to get coffee...

[zarmanto]

 lightnquick, on 09 June 2012 - 01:02 PM, said:

One drawback, however, of this approach is that battery performance declines quicker in a device that is constantly plugged in. If battery life (and its life expectancy) is important to you, It is recommended to unplug a notebook frequently for several hours.

This sounds like a potentially interesting observation -- and worthy of citing your sources. Because while I know this to be true of Ni-Cad batteries and to a lesser extent also of NiMH batteries, I'm reasonably certain that this comment does not apply to the lithium ion batteries which you will find in nearly all laptop computers, these days. In fact, quite the opposite: lithium ion battery life expectancy is measured in charge/drain cycles. ( my own obligatory source citation )

 lightnquick, on 09 June 2012 - 01:02 PM, said:

... The other (and very different) issue is the power draw of devices that are on standby - in a household this can amount to quite a bit. ...

While I can understand your idealistic slant, I'd have to point out that this is factually incorrect. Innumerable people have analyzed this very issue for their own edification and then shared their findings on the web, and the general consensus is that a computing device on standby consumes barely more energy then a computing device that is plugged in and turned off. ( source citation ) In fact, the cost savings of unplugging it is less then three cents per day, according to one such report. ( one last source citation, just for fun ) So if you really want to hold to your own idealism, you should not only turn off the machine... but turn off the power strip that it's plugged into (or unplug the computer) as well.

This post has been edited by zarmanto: 10 June 2012 - 06:34 AM

[golfintosh]

Force quitting a program isn't "fixing" anything - fixing implies resolving the reason program(s) hang. But yes, AM is a good way to monitor the CPU use etc. If you KNOW what program is hanging (usually obvious) one can also possibly Force Quit direct from the dock without bothering to open AM.

[gavineadie]

 RobLewis, on 07 June 2012 - 11:05 AM, said:

 soulatrium, on 07 June 2012 - 08:59 AM, said:

You should add a section about checking for memory use. Many times an app will slow down the whole system not because of CPU usage, but because of excessive memory usage (often a memory leak). Safari and iPhoto can be prime offenders on this one!

Amen to that! IMO it's unconscionable the way Safari hogs memory. I have seen it using over 2GB with no browser windows open! (A developer once described this to me as "Object-Oriented Disease"). It may be somewhat better since Apple split Safari into two components, I'm not sure. But I still get the "Web pages are not responding" warning way too often.

2010 MacBook Pro, 4GB, 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo .. Mac OS X 10.7.4 .. My laptop has become very, very slow and I attribute this to excessive paging, probably because Safari does as described above. What's frustrating is that I've not found a good way to be sure about this. The behavior in regular use points toward thrashing, I think. I can click on, for example, a cell in Excel to enter text and then wait for more than a minute (that's a measured time) while the colored pizza of death' does its thing. I'm assuming this is the VM pager desperately pushing Safari pages to disk backing store and Excel back into RAM, though it still seems like a very long time even for that. While this is happening, disk activity is continuous and CPU use is about zero.

The article we're replying to deals with CPU load issues, but I'd love an article that helped diagnose the reason for extreme slow-downs when CPU utilization is about 5%.

[zarmanto]

 golfintosh, on 11 June 2012 - 03:33 AM, said:

... If you KNOW what program is hanging (usually obvious) one can also possibly Force Quit direct from the dock without bothering to open AM.

True, but there are select circumstances when that doesn't work; one obvious example would be if a background process (such as the Dock itself) is hung. Thus, it's always good to know where the power tools are, and how to use them, when the every-day-use tools fail you for some reason.

[zarmanto]

 gavineadie, on 11 June 2012 - 05:03 AM, said:

... What's frustrating is that I've not found a good way to be sure about this. ...

That one is easy: Stop using Safari on that computer for a day or two, and see if there is a difference. (Perhaps you could substitute either Firefox or Chrome in the interim?) However, in the event that this change has little or no impact, read on below...

 gavineadie, on 11 June 2012 - 05:03 AM, said:

... While this is happening, disk activity is continuous and CPU use is about zero.

The article we're replying to deals with CPU load issues, but I'd love an article that helped diagnose the reason for extreme slow-downs when CPU utilization is about 5%.

Activity Monitor can monitor more then just CPU usage; among other things, you can use it to get basic statistics on your RAM usage and your hard disk activity as well -- which are the two places that you probably need to be looking to diagnose your particular issue. Off the cuff, it sounds to me like you have a nearly full or a seriously fragmented hard drive. Either and/or both of those conditions can make paging take significantly longer then it should.

I've experienced such issues myself: the internal hard drive on my iMac (the specs of which are in my sig below) was reaching max capacity regularly due to my inattentive use of an EyeTV DVR, and I knew full well that it was adversely affecting performance -- but I had no idea just how serious the impact was until I'd completed a bit of surgery. I pulled the original 500GB drive, dropped in a 2TB drive, reinstalled the OS, and copied everything over to the new drive; drive thrashing disappeared almost entirely, and system performance improved across the board.

If you determine that capacity/fragmentation issues are likely to be what's causing your problems as well, then there are, of course, somewhat less drastic methods than full on computer surgery for resolving the issue -- but pretty much all solutions involve, at a minimum, making more space available on your boot drive.

[RoyWagner]

Quite frequently when my Mac slows down it shows a high amount of CPU being used by the Safari Flash plugin.

[jhumroo]

My late-2009 Mini, running Lion, seems to be slower since I upgraded to 8GB from 4GB.

The apps that are running constantly on my Mac are Safari and Mail. Everything else, I launch when necessary and quit when done.

The main culprit seems to be Safari and its associated processes. It seems to suck-up all available memory and my system slows down to a crawl after a few hours of use.

So I use Free Memory to clear-up the memory and get things back to normal. But I wish Apple would fix these problems when Mountain Lion is release.

[macDG]

 soulatrium, on 07 June 2012 - 08:59 AM, said:

You should add a section about checking for memory use. Many times an app will slow down the whole system not because of CPU usage, but because of excessive memory usage (often a memory leak).

Overloaded memory demands are a huge problem for me on my 2010 MacBook Pro and my 2008 3.06mhz iMac 8.1, both of which have the 4GB maximum RAM.

I use a great utility, ATMonitor, that enhances the Activity Monitor information and puts up menubar icons for CPU, RAM, and NET usage like MenuMeters but with added data. My experience is that for most applications CPU usage will be down in the 30-40% range while RAM usage will be 97-99%.

Invariably the biggest RAM hogs are Kernel Task, which will be using more than a GB, Safari and any other browsers I have open, and then iPhoto/iTunes/iMovie/iWeb which I only leave open long enough to complete the task. Memory usage is reported by ATMonitor in percentage and if either of these computers have been running for more than a day, the RAM percentage is in the high 90s, with all the frustrating lack of response. I reboot about once a week to attempt to overcome the RAM exhaustion but then have to suffer though all the slow application launches as mentioned.

This problem alone has kept me in SnowLeopard 10.6.8 as I am afraid that the RAM demands of Lion can only make things worse. One poster suggests reviewing Console to see why Kernel Task is so demanding - my question being; what could we be looking for in Console to help define the issue, especially since the same behavior is present in two different computers?

[soulatrium]

 macDG, on 11 June 2012 - 12:02 PM, said:

 soulatrium, on 07 June 2012 - 08:59 AM, said:

You should add a section about checking for memory use. Many times an app will slow down the whole system not because of CPU usage, but because of excessive memory usage (often a memory leak).

Overloaded memory demands are a huge problem for me on my 2010 MacBook Pro and my 2008 3.06mhz iMac 8.1, both of which have the 4GB maximum RAM.

I use a great utility, ATMonitor, that enhances the Activity Monitor information and puts up menubar icons for CPU, RAM, and NET usage like MenuMeters but with added data. My experience is that for most applications CPU usage will be down in the 30-40% range while RAM usage will be 97-99%.

Invariably the biggest RAM hogs are Kernel Task, which will be using more than a GB, Safari and any other browsers I have open, and then iPhoto/iTunes/iMovie/iWeb which I only leave open long enough to complete the task. Memory usage is reported by ATMonitor in percentage and if either of these computers have been running for more than a day, the RAM percentage is in the high 90s, with all the frustrating lack of response. I reboot about once a week to attempt to overcome the RAM exhaustion but then have to suffer though all the slow application launches as mentioned.

This problem alone has kept me in SnowLeopard 10.6.8 as I am afraid that the RAM demands of Lion can only make things worse. One poster suggests reviewing Console to see why Kernel Task is so demanding - my question being; what could we be looking for in Console to help define the issue, especially since the same behavior is present in two different computers?

Keep in mind that you are not just looking for "Free" memory, but really for the combination of "Free" and "Inactive" (in the "System Memory" tab of Activity Monitor) to know how much is available to other apps, since inactive memory (memory that was used for something else but is now not being used for anything) as well as free memory can be allocated by the system when necessary.

[macDG]

 zarmanto, on 11 June 2012 - 05:13 AM, said:

True, but there are select circumstances when that doesn't work; one obvious example would be if a background process (such as the Dock itself) is hung. Thus, it's always good to know where the power tools are, and how to use them, when the every-day-use tools fail you for some reason.

When I run into overloaded memory issues and need to Force Quit I often find the Dock icons especially non-responsive. IF ATMonitor is in a visible window I use it to Force Quit, but often I think the fastest and most robust avenue is CMD-OPT-Escape to call up the Force Quit dialog. I get to use this a LOT....
:-(((

This post has been edited by macDG: 11 June 2012 - 12:13 PM